


Dead on Arrival

by Bigmurderenergy



Series: The (After) Life of the Party [4]
Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, F/M, Homophobic Language, I'm trying to excuse his internalized homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Richie needs a hug, Self-Esteem Issues, but I'm not, but he's confused about why, fucking reagan, if you're interested read about the 1980s/90s AIDS crisis in America, it was a fucking horrible time, it was awful, this a look into the homophobia in the 1980s, this a look into why this could affect a person's psyche
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-20 05:18:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20669957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bigmurderenergy/pseuds/Bigmurderenergy
Summary: "I know your secret."Richie Tozier tries to figure out what that means.





	Dead on Arrival

**Author's Note:**

> I'm deeply passionate about the 1980s AIDs crisis. It was avoidable. Millions died because the governments in power decided that the moral aspect of the disease overpowered the rights of the people.
> 
> And Richie Tozier lived through that and I'm trying to understand why he never actualized his homosexuality. Everyone hug him.

Richie’s encounter with Pennywise left him asking one question, one which he knew the answer, but it still caused him a lot of heartache.

“I know your secret.”

What does that even mean?

Is it a secret if he can’t even answer?

Richie had spent his life growing through one of the most tumultuous times in domestic policy in the USA’s history. Besides. You know. The Civil War. Which he learned about in school. So, Richie knows that the time between the natives and the invaders was a time in which one side won and the other did not. And that describes the entire environment in which he exists. Plus, invaders are the wrong word. Plus, natives are the wrong word. School was a weird place.

So. Reagan.

Yeah. We’re going there.

Richie was born in 1979. In the 80s there was a war. A war against the idea of heteronomativity. That simplifies it. But it was an action against the aberration. Specifically, gay men.

Richie saw it in the news. The idea that homosexuality was a crime against God. It sticks with you. The idea that being who you are is an aberration of normality. He was in his preteens and the news. The TV. That thing that raised him more than his parents ever did. It kept telling him, to love a man as a man was wrong. If you did you would get AIDs and die.

It fucks with your perception of who you are. Especially when holding and loving your best friend, who is also a boy, is just wrong. You may even die from it.

He didn’t want to die.

Not to say he hasn’t wanted to die while being alive. Richie didn’t ask to be born. He especially didn’t ask to be born in this time. To those specific parents. He just is. This may inform the alcoholism but to be honest, that’s getting ahead of himself.

He fell in love with Eddie when he was 11. 1991. The AIDs crisis was at its height. If you watched the TV, which Richie did every day, while hearing his parents scream at each other in their bedroom, you’d see a different world. A world that actively hated the idea of the love between a man and a man.

When Richie saw Eddie. Kissed his forehead. Saw his big beautiful brown eyes and he couldn’t act in the way he wanted. Because if he did. He would die. He didn’t need Pennywise to tell him that. It was everywhere. People dying from a mysterious disease. One that the government were actively obstructing treatment to on moral grounds.

People knew it was happening and they let those around them die. Richie saw that.

He saw the guy who wandered around town, flamboyantly wearing bright colours and talking like a woman, wither and die. Slowly. Surely. The media he consumed told him, that man deserved it. His name was Fred. Fucking Fred. He was just living his life. But everything told Richie that he was wrong for doing that. He deserved it.

Richie never slept with a man. The idea was abhorrent to him. If he did so he would die. This is something he knew. This is what he had been informed by hundreds of newspaper reports before, a few dozen special reports on the ABC. It was the 1980s. What else could he know?

You carry what you learn in your childhood. It’s why they send you to school. To learn. To read. To experience.

When the only thing you’re taught is that what you’re feeling is wrong, then Richie truly believed he was wrong.

He looked into Eddie’s big brown eyes. He saw love. He saw acceptance but he couldn’t bring those feelings to the surface because of the plague covering his country in pain and loss. He wanted to. God. He wanted to. But the action could never come.

In time he forgot those feelings. Assumed that he never felt them at all. Drank them away. It was the safest course of action. If he actualized them, well. He would die. That was what he learned.

Fucking Reagan.

Seeing the visions of his true fears presented to him in the way of a supernatural clown sitting on top of a Paul Bunyan statue reveals that in ways he didn’t want to believe.

“I know your secret.”

The secret Richie tried so hard to hide from everyone.

If he actualized his true feelings, then he would certainly be damned for all eternity. How could he reveal that to anyone? It had to remain a secret because of the world in which he lived. He was a fucking celebrity. No one could know.

Do you know how many actors are gay? Of course, you don’t. Here’s a thing, Richie has met most of them. And he could tell you how many he’s made out with. Most of them male. Most of them stopping things before they got too heavy. The alcohol made it feel good. The clarity of their reality made it feel wrong.

Not to say that the AIDs crisis informed those encounters.

Richie isn’t dumb. Financially, it’s more appropriate to be straight. That’s why he was ok with his publicist and writers informing everyone of his previous girlfriends and endless rendezvous with beautiful women. Richie didn’t hate that. He loved the attention. But that was a standard at this point.

He made more money being who he wasn’t. The success came from the idea rather than the identity. If he talked about his reality, then he would lose the success he had worked so hard to garner. It wasn’t about the money. But it was.

The question. Although it was never a question to begin with.

“Are you gay?” One man asked after Richie held him a microsecond too long. After he sniffed his neck longingly.

“No. Course not. Just drunk.” Richie smiled widely.

It was always the alcohol.

It became an easy excuse. Maybe that’s why he kept drinking.

Richie had had three girlfriends. He went to sex therapy. He had a therapist. Who kept telling him that he wasn’t getting what he wanted from these relationships. She pointed out he could perform within them. His therapist looked at him when he said this. She saw him for what he was. But he couldn’t tell her the truth.

He thought about those boys in Queens. Those floors he slept on. All those nights where his shoulders grinded against hard wooden floors. Those sounds that reverberated throughout the apartment. The noise that made his heart beat faster and his breath come out quicker. He didn’t want to believe it was a problem. Even with tears in his eyes he couldn’t admit to the problem that was right in front of him.

Is Richie Tozier gay?

He can’t tell you that.

And yet. Standing in front of Eddie.

All those feelings he can’t control. Affection, intimacy, love. They can’t be real because it isn’t right. Eddie is married. To a woman. Myra. The woman Eddie wanted Richie to meet. Maybe they could double date. Maybe this was the height of the intimacy they could achieve in adulthood.

If Richie is being honest, he wanted to do all the things he did with those random women in the past with Eddie. Unclasping their bras felt wrong. Removing his shirt though. Seeing Eddie naked for the purpose that could lead to something wonderful.

Eddie looked at him. Cheek punctured with a stab wound, blood still dripping and Richie could only think about licking it clean. He could only think about healing Eddie with his body. Covering him. Protecting him.

And yet.

“I know your secret.”

And everything came flooding back.

He looked at Eddie and saw a future. A life. A love that he couldn’t contain.

And he stopped.

**Author's Note:**

> P.S Rent sucks. Argue me in the comments.


End file.
